Divorce, reunions, and the 1992 album Lou Reed wished he never released
If you’re proud of an album, you’re obviously going to want to release it for the world to hear, and even if an album is obviously not going to win you any fans, you might still feel the temptation to release it anyway. Just ask Lou Reed; he did this plenty of times.
Having been the driving force behind The Velvet Underground, a band that divided opinion to the extreme at the time, Reed was already acutely aware of just how scathing people could be in their assessments of his work, with just as many prominent voices in the music industry berating the band as there were those who applauded their transgressive approach to rock and roll.
However, very characteristically of Reed, this level of derision never deterred him; in fact, it only seemed to spur him on even more, and it certainly didn’t stop him from releasing several albums that acted as a gigantic fuck you to anyone who wasn’t willing to operate on his level. The release of Metal Machine Music, an hour-long experiment of noisy tape loops and distorted guitar released in 1975, was far from the sort of thing that would gain critical acclaim, and yet, Reed didn’t seem to mind that it flew over the heads of most people.
He never seemed to care about these sorts of congratulatory kudos-giving exercises, and only ever seemed to care about remaining completely authentic and true to his beliefs. However, when you’ve written something you consider to be a masterpiece that touches on incredibly personal themes to you and others criticise it, then you might think that those dissenters aren’t deserving of hearing it.
His 1992 album Magic and Loss may well be the best example of this from his career, or at least the first instance of an album where he genuinely felt hurt by the negative reaction it received from some contemporary critics, who dismissed it as being the sort of middling album about death and mortality that many washed up rockers tend to write when they’re slowly approaching the twilight of their career.
After its release, Reed took four years to release another record, and many thought that the reason for this uncharacteristically long radio silence was because of him having been deterred by his audience’s misinterpretation of the themes of death and spirituality. On the contrary, this four-year fallow period was actually a busy one, and it helped him to put into perspective just how he needed to rethink his approach.
Between 1992 and 1996, Reed embarked both on a solo tour and a handful of reunion dates with The Velvet Underground, as well as divorcing from his wife of 14 years, Sylvia Morales. Reflecting on this spell away from the studio in a 1996 interview with Billboard, he said that making Magic and Loss had been exhausting for him, and in retrospect, it was perhaps the only time he’d released an album when he didn’t feel as though it should have been given to the world.
“That album took a lot out of me,” Reed argued. “I was really obsessed with getting it out to people, because I knew how much resistance there would be. It got tagged as ‘Lou Reed’s Death Record’, and the thing was, it wasn’t meant to be that at all, and it was a bad thing to be tagged with, because it kind of chilled the record dead.”
It must be hard to reckon with this sort of pushback, but the fact that in the years since, people have managed to understand and appreciate it for what it is only goes to prove that once again, Reed was just ahead of everyone else and totally justified in his creative decisions.
